Posts Tagged «windows»

At an event in San Francisco today (1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific, 6pm UK) Microsoft will unveil Windows 9 — or whatever Microsoft ends up calling it. The event is expected to focus on the Desktop and enterprise side of things, though Microsoft might also show off some of the changes to the Metro/mobile side of things. We’ll be covering the event here with a live blog, and photos from our reporter in San Francisco — but sadly, it seems Microsoft won’t be providing a live video stream.

Microsoft has sent out the official press invites for an event on September 30, where we are almost certain that Windows 9 (codenamed Threshold) will be unveiled. The Windows 9 Technical Preview should be handed out to event attendees, and should also be available online on September 30 or very soon after.

Yesterday it was screenshots — and today we have a glorious video of the new Windows 9 Start menu. The video shows in much greater detail how the new Start menu will intertwine the old Windows 7-era Start menu with aspects of Windows 8’s Metro interface. Putting aside for a moment that the Windows 9 Start menu was clearly cut from Metro cloth, I’m actually pleasantly surprised by the functionality and UI displayed in the video.

A bunch of new Windows 9 technical preview screenshots have been leaked… and I think you will either be curiously surprised, or utterly revolted. Good news: In Windows 9, it does indeed look like Desktop users won’t be thrust back into the full-screen Metro interface. Bad news: The Desktop interface now looks like it has been infected by Metro.

There is an increasing amount of evidence that Microsoft is preparing to drop all of its different brands of Windows — Windows Phone, Windows 8, Windows 9, Windows RT — and simply call them all Windows. The idea would be that, in the mind of the consumer, Windows is just Windows, and that all of these different names and flavors are just confusing. Getting rid of all that complexity and returning to the old way — where Windows is synonymous with personal computing — would certainly be a coup for Microsoft.

IFA 2014 kicked off in Berlin this morning, and already we’re seeing an interesting trend emerge: Those cheap-and-cheerful small-screen Windows 8 tablets that Microsoft promised back in April are finally arriving. Both Toshiba and Acer have announced their offerings (priced at $120 and $150 respectively), and the usual OEM suspects (Dell, HP, etc.) should unveil their offerings over the next couple of days. These tablets will all be fairly low-spec devices with either a 7- or 8-inch screen, and most of them will be powered by an Intel Atom (Bay Trail) SoC. This means you can now get a full Windows 8.1 device for just $120 — a proposition so juicy that Microsoft hopes it can entice customers away from cheap Android tablets and into the Windows camp.

In a rather odd turn of events, Microsoft China has posted a Windows 9 teaser on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. The teaser, which featured a rather awful fan-made Windows 9 wallpaper, was quickly removed. The post by Microsoft China clearly stated that Windows 9 is ‘coming soon,’ all but confirming that we’ll get our first look at Windows 9 at a special event later this month (probably September 30).

At long last, Google has released a stable 64-bit version of Chrome for Windows. It’s faster, more secure, and more stable. Some tasks, such as decoding HD video on YouTube, are 15% faster under the 64-bit version of Chrome. The only major caveat seems to be a lack of support for 32-bit NPAPI plug-ins — Silverlight and Java, and lots of lesser-known plug-ins, won’t work on 64-bit Chrome. That’s a small price to pay for increased speed, security, and twice the stability of 32-bit Chrome, though.

According to new Windows 9 leaks and rumors, it seems we could be in for some dramatic changes by the time the first public preview of Windows 9 rolls around on September 30. The most recent leaked builds of Windows 9 (codename Threshold) indicate that Microsoft will finally fix the awful upgrade process that has plagued Windows for almost two decades, replacing it with a one-click upgrade system. Perhaps more excitingly, another source says that Windows 9 will formally split the Metro and Desktop interfaces: Tablets will be restricted to Metro, while laptops and desktops will be locked to the standard Desktop interface.

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